'Actually, America currently lives in a Golden Age by historical standards. People can buy candy bars for less than people used to pay for pieces of rags. The trouble, if there is one, is the habits and baggage of prior history, the particular dilemmas such as natural disasters that strike at various times periodically, and the inability to know our own strategy in the context of prior strategies, and the ones that follow. By this point however, as arrogant and blind as Americans supposedly are, there should be reason enough to know something about how to continue history. Consider that this is the form of how not to despair. Maybe the dark side is that I'm underpaid. Maybe that brightens your day, whether you are thinking that poor people have no potential, or that money is not well spent—it turns out, neither of those theories is true.'